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Yet another company has gotten in trouble for greenwashing. Raz Godelnik writes in Triple Pundit about cereal giant General Mills’ legal woes: multiple lawsuits over deceptive packaging, claiming for example that its Nature Valley brand of granola bars is “all natural” when in fact it’s highly processed and contains such ingredients as maltodextrin.

You’d think by now companies woud have caught on that honesty really is the best policy.

Of course, it would be nice if the word “natural” actually had a legal definition, and thus some teeth. But it would also be nice if a company that claims to be strongly guided by ethics would do a better job of walking its talk.

It’s been a great discussion the past few days about whether and when it makes sense to work with companies that don’t share your values. I promised to add my own views after we’d gotten some comments, and thus, this post—which I wrote before receiving any of the comments, but chose to hold back on posting:

Here’s my take, as a long-time peace/environmental activist who also writes about how to leverage social change through business. You have these options:
1. Be a purist and refuse any tainted money or tainted partnerships, defining taint to mean that the company is in some way involved in things you disagree with.

2. “Separation of powers,” where you will work with a company that has dirty hands, but only work on the clean-hands aspects of that company.

3. Use the partnership to actively push the company toward more progressive stances, and eventually to abandon the actions that caused you to look askance in the first place.

I’ve evolved on this issue over time. In the 70s, I’m pretty sure I’d have been a #1. And been out in the streets with the protestors. But that was before I saw how the business world can not only change itself, but become a fulcrum for change in the wider society. These days, I’m at least a #2 and when possible, a #3. I’m even in dialogue with an outfit that does seminars for utility companies—and I told them I would not assist with anything that promoted nuclear (and if they hire me to present, I will definitely be using my bully pulpit to push the #3-style agenda to the utilities attending the conference).

But I do think there might be companies (or governments) whose philosophy is so opposed to mine that I would still be a number 1, still refuse to get my hands dirty.

I also recognize that sustainability is a path, and we are all somewhere on the path. I am not sure you could find a person who is living 100% sustainably. Even my very self-sufficient 90-year-old friend who lives in a mountaintop cabin she and her late husband built themselves, with no electricity or running water, grows most of her own food, and keeps her income below the taxable level—creates carbon emissions with her woodstove.

I think a great example is Walmart. I don’t choose to shop there, because I oppose its policies on labor issues, community development impact, predatory pricing, and a host of other areas. At the same time, I have publicly lauded Walmart, many times, for its groundbreaking, deep, systemic attention to sustainability. And I point out that Walmart is not a company of tree-huggers, but of executives looking to maximize profit. I’m willing to publicly praise Walmart’s ability make and save boatloads of money through enormous initiatives to use less energy and to introduce organic foods/green products to customers who would *never* set foot in a Whole Foods–even while choosing to put my own shopping dollars elsewhere.

I discuss this kind of conundrum a bit in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

On one of the green discussion groups, someone raised the question whether it’s appropriate to work with a company whose mission is at odds with your values—on the parts where your values intersect. So, for example, would a pacifist environmentalist work with a military contractor on a sustainability project?

The discussion came out of this New York Times article about the conflict between green purists and green pragmatists about working with military contractor Lockheed Martin.

I have a very definite opinion on this, and will post it over the weekend—but I’d like to see what others think. Will you please post a comment, below?

Two stories in today’s paper about high consequences for corporate greed—and both of them have significant environmental as well as business ethics interest.

First, a local company here in Massachusetts, Stevens Urethane, faces a five-year ban on manufacturing a technology used in making solar panels, as well as more than $8.6 million in assorted fines, penalties, and other costs. The company was found guilty of stealing the secrets of a competitor, and the judge’s ruing not only impounded more than a million dollars worth of revenue, but forbade the company from using a $2 million assembly line it had built to make the product. Punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and reimbursement of the other side’s legal and expert witness fees combined to create the $8.6 million total.

But the cost of this business ethics failure is only 1/1000th of the costs slapped onto oil giant Chevron by the government of Ecuador. While the $8.6 billion amount was less than 1/3 of the court-appointed expert’s recommendation, it is still the largest damage award ere in an environmental damage lawsuit (and probably the first of many more around the world against oil companies, which have been sued for habitat destruction in Nigeria and elsewhere).

Ironically, this suit had originally been filed in US courts against Texaco (now owned by Chevron), and the company’s attorneys successfully argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador.

Eeeeew! Yesterday’s New York Times had an eight-page story on the antics of an Internet criminal: a fraud artist who takes people’s money for genuine brand names, sends counterfeits, or maybe just pockets the money, threatens his customers with bodily harm or worse when they complain—and is delighted by the complaints because they get him great positions in Google! Somehow, he manages to keep his merchant account and mostly stay out of jail.

According to the Times article, he has even had someone call up a customer’s credit card-issuing bank pretending to be the customer, withdrawing the fraud complaint. He’s the sort of person that makes you want to wash your hands with strong soap after just reading about him.

I am not going to risk increasing his Google juice by naming him or his company. You can get all that in the Times article. And promise me you’ll read it before buying any designer eyewear online.

Given the appalling lack of business ethics, the clear and numerous cases of fraud, the monstrous encyclopedia of wronged customers, I don’t understand why he hasn’t been shut down. These are the sort of people who give business, and especially online business, a bad name. This is massive fraud and theft—and the credit card processing companies, law enforcement agencies, and of course his hundreds of victims need to band together to shut him down permanently and show him that even though it may take a while, ultimately, crime doesn’t pay. I’d love to see him get a looong sentence.

By Alexis Bonari

[Editor's note: Yes, this is fairly elementary—but it's nice to be reminded of the basics once in a while. If this topic interests you and you want more depth, I recommend Stephen M.R. Covey's Speed of Trust as well as my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).
—Shel Horowitz]

In our ultra-competitive business world, it is easy to excuse treading on the wrong side of the line that separates necessary competition from sleazy behavior. The younger generation—those in their teens and twenties—have been bombarded with the idea that honor and ethics are relative terms. In other words, if everyone else appears to be cheating the system, it’s “ok” for me to do the same.

Do ethical people get left in the dust?

So, what really happens to businessmen and women who try to play by the rules of good business ethics? Do they get pushed aside by their more competitive, meaner contemporaries? The answer would appear to be “no”.

There’s a reason for everything.

Everything has a source, an origin. Even if we believe that ethics are relative, they still must come from somewhere. Our modern business ethics are founded on philosophical principals that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Humankind has continually refined these rules of conduct so that people can interact with each other in a positive, non-violent manner. Therefore, there is a practical, utilitarian purpose behind agreeing to a code of ethics.

It’s all about trust.

Essentially, we work together best when we feel that we can trust each other. Doing business is the ultimate form of working together. If an individual has questionable dealings in their past, it is highly likely that they will suffer some sort of backlash for it, be that publicly or privately. Take the executives at Enron as an example. They employed very aggressive, hyper-competitive strategies for amassing wealth. When investors felt they could be trusted, they were given huge sums of money. As their underhanded dealings came to light, they became the poster-children for unethical business practices and were reviled by a nation.

Although unethical business practices might result in short-term success, this rarely translates into stable business relationships in the long run. In this sense, those who choose to take a strong ethical stance generally come out ahead in the end.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching various online college degree programs. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

As I’ve been publicly thinking out loud about forming the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers (a trade association for Green marketers), this article by Matthew Ammirati on MediaPost, “Is It Enough To Be Green? What About Being Good?” seems very timely.

The article asks whether we should…

…be buying an all-natural household cleaner in a recycled package but if the company has a team of migrants in Africa working in horrendous conditions in 18-hour shifts, does it really make you feel better about buying that product?

These kinds of questions come up regularly in my work the last decade or so, and they raise their heads again in thinking about how this organization will work. For instance, what happens if people who work on Walmart’s sustainability initiatives apply for membership?

Walmart has a lot of Green cred. They’ve done a tremendous amount in the past few years not only to make their own operations substantially Greener (and not coincidentally saving hundreds of millions of dollars. But there are many other aspects of their operation that are deeply troubling to me, and I don’t shop there.

I just looked again at the proposed behavior standards for membership–and I don’t see anything that would keep Walmart out. So if the organization were to adopt those standards, someone working on marketing Walmart’s sustainability initiatives would be welcome, as long as they were doing real Green marketing and not greenwashing. So would the conservative political consultant who has posted a couple of comments on these working drafts. Employees of a company such as Halliburton might have a much harder time proving they qualify.

What about a tougher case? Suppose someone has been involved with the sustainability initiatives over at BP (a company that actually at one point was fairly well regarded by mainstream environmentalists)? What about questions about supply chain and vendor practices and investing and charity programs and and and… Some kind of arbitration system will be needed to determine who qualifies and who does not. Any ideas for how to set that up?

In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I very clearly and deliberately link ethical behavior and Green practices, and point out that the two combined are a powerful path to success. But the standards of behavior I’ve proposed for membership in this trade association are focused on the Green side and don’t really talk about ethics other than in a specifically Green context (e.g., no greenwashing). Should those broader issues be addressed? By whom, and who judges?

Yesterday’s edition of Christopher Baauer’s Weekly Ethics Thought newsletter bore a startling statistic:

43.8% of the surveyed companies said they would not refer uncovered fraud to law enforcement due to fears of bad publicity.

Wow! So these companies are potentially throwing away millions of dollars because they’re too ashamed of the bad press they’d receive.
Like Bauer, I say avoid the problem in the first place by having strong ethics programs in place from the get-go.

Of course, in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I make the case that strong ethics can actually be a profit center–but we’ll cut the bean-counters some slack and demonstrate that at least a culture of ethics has significant cost-control advantages.

His article isn’t on the Web, but here’s a link to Bauer’s site.

An open letter to Bernie Madoff (how appropriate, that last name!)

Dear Mr. Made-off

Was it worth it?
$50 billion in your pocket–but the rest of your life in jail and your name disgraced forever?

Was it worth it to have kicked the legs out from under some of the worthiest charities in the country, not to mention thousands of individual investors for some quick personal gain?

And why does anyone need $50 billion to begin with? Couldn’t you have lived lavishly enough stealing just a few million?

You are a disgrace to the business community! Thank goodness there are those who think differently about business, who accept the consequences of their actions, and who use business to advance the common good. Business at its best is a laboratory for innovation, a funnel for economic improvement, and the engine of the economy.

Bernard Madoff, How great you could have been if you’d used your considerable skills toward better ends! Do you feel any guilt and shame? Or just frustration that you got caught?

Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.